Tuesday, July 31, 2007

ClickOnce - or: how to instafuck your whole installed base with one click of the mouse!

Fuck me that was fucked.

We are rolling out a new version of a program which is updated via ClickOnce. We currently (luckily) have about 12 of 80 machines installed - the rest are using the old, manually updated software. I am actually pretty glad that we had today's problem today and not in a couple of days time when the whole thing was rolled out - _that_ would have been a major shit fight.

This morning I got a request for changes. Nothing huge. Thought it would be a nice demonstration for the live update feature of the new system. 10 minutes to code. Took my time testing, 1 hour. Published the changes onto the beta site, let the test machines auto-update. Cool. I sign off on the mods, the client give the go-ahead for live. I publish on the live server. Sweet. Now I keep a test machine connected up to the live publication just so I can have a last minute test to make sure all is well. I go and run the client on that machine. The auto-update barfs. Crap. I go to look in the program group for the program. The machine freezes. Crap crap. I reboot and try again. No go. Now I am starting to get a little worried. I connect up to one of the client's live machines which is not being used at the moment and let the auto-update run. Barf. Crap crap crap. Machine freezes. Fuck. I try to uninstall the program, the item does not disappear from the control panel. I try again. Freeze. Reboot. Uninstall. Okay. Now I reinstall the new version, and it works. However the calls have started to come into the call centre... “We logged out and logged in again and it did its auto-update and now the computer is broken”. Fuuuck. So the technicians get to work some overtime uninstalling the broken update then reinstalling it from scratch, and I get to do some overtime to work out why the fuck it did not work.

After a 30 or so re-deployments in different configurations I find out that some kind soul has installed Windows Installer 3.1 on my testbed. I add it as a prerequisite so it gets installed first - now the auto-update works. So that is why my initial deployment test did not fail - there seems to be some kind of problem with the default version of Windows Installer, and I didn't see it because the testbed already was using a later version. I go check in with the technicians and we run a test on a machine that was not yet fucked up - installed Windows Installer 3.1, then let the auto-update run - no problemo. Fuck. I wanna break someone's fingers!

So after an hour of downtime for > 10% of the system I know what we have to do - re-do the install from scratch with Windows Installer 3.1 as a prerequisite. We have to start again because it has to be installed as Administrator. I am not going to be popular with the technicians...

I used to like ClickOnce. But now I am not so sure. It is very difficult to integrate into a responsible deployment strategy. When the whole system is deployed that way, how can you test a new update? I have never seen a case where the re-install (rather than the auto-update) does not work, so you can't just say that if the clean install works the auto-update will work. So imagine that all the machines are deployed from the live site - the auto-update is kind of all or nothing, you can't point a few machines at a different server to make sure the update works. I guess you could copy the live site to a test site, install from there, then update the test site and let an update go through. There is also no rollback. Once you let the update go, it's gone baby.

Just goes to show you - must have test machine that is identical to the live. Well, I'm off to padlock up the test machine... where did I put those thumbscrews?

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Wake up!

For a while now I have had an alarm clock that can wake you up to a CD. I used it a bit to wake up to music, but I had always thought that I could do better than that and create a playlist specifically for waking up. Mostly I had to have the volume up loud enough to ensure that I woke up eventually, meaning that it was too loud at the start, jarring me awake - which I wanted to avoid.

Some things that I have noted about waking up. Waking up to the beep beep alarm is not nice, but it is certain to make you leave the bed. Waking up to white noise it better, but it is possible to sleep through. Waking up to nice music is the best, but again sleeping through is a distinct possibility. When I am not super tired, I will generally wake up at the sound of the CD spinning up, or the light pop sound the amplifier makes when turning on.

So what I have thought might be nice is a kind of ramping up in the volume and wakeability of the noise. I was thinking something like: Low volume environmental sounds, white noise like, waves, wind. Most time I would wake up to this, perhaps drifting in and out of sleep, remembering dreams, getting ready to get up. Low volume relaxing music. This will make me up if I miss the first sounds, I may even get up now if I was fully awoken by the first phase. Medium volume energetic music. This signals the time to rise. Could be possible to sleep until now, if so this will wake me. Loud music that it is basically not possible to sleep through, techno, metal, something like that. The three remaining are the backup plan. I basically don't see getting to this point very often. Medium to loud white noise tones. Loud beeping. David calls in dead.

So what remains now is choice of musics. I am thinking one of the tracks from the glasshouse CD for the environmental sounds. Either one of the early movements from a Bach cannon and fugue or something from hallucinogen for the relaxing. Good wake up music... indy rock, thinking female vocal, rising crescendo... have to think about this one for the medium volume energetic. Loud music backup. So many choices... PWEI, Rage, anything a bit violent and raucous.

Should play with the audio levels on the MP3s that I create for this so that the volume ramps up nicely. May not even have to worry about the final stages, just put another loud sound on with the levels really tweaked in the MP3.

(Might also be interesting to make the playlist, then merge it all into one track so that I can do different ones with different music and use them on shuffle so I don't get sick of the same music every morning...)

Friday, July 06, 2007

Just do it

I feel like productivity people (the GTD crowd, that sleep guy, zenhabits) explaining how to lose bad habits, how to have a morning routine, how to organise your life is much the same as some happy person telling a depressed person to “just feel happy”.

I read somewhere today that when introducing a new habit into your lifestyle, “the first step is getting yourself to do it”. Fuck no buddy - the WHOLE THING is getting myself to do it. Do you not understand that what I have trouble getting myself to do is ‘getting myself to do things’?

Why so glum little girl? “I'm depressed”. Well cheer up, you'll feel much better if you just smile and be happy. Being happy is the first step on the road to not being depressed.

*Barf*